gathered at great personal risk of
psycholinguistic harm from actual student papers

by Madalena Cruz-Ferreira

This 51st collection of students’ pearls of wisdom, laboriously digitised from hand-written papers, demonstrates once again how students new to the study of language speculate about grammar after having imperfectly absorbed what their teachers think they have taught them.

On Schools of Linguistic Thought

Saussure was the first man to write about language.

Saussure found associative relationships and the structuralists took advantage of this to establish syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships.

The purpose of Saussure’s linguistic signs is to explain the minimal units of a language.

Harris is a generative grammarian, whereas Saussure already is transformational.

Humans have the ability to think but we can also play with words, as in a chess game as Chomsky said.

According to Chomsky’s concept, we know that any person, even a child, has innate competence ability.

Chomsky thought that grammar should be divided into two different types, surface grammar and profound grammar, which were obtained through transformations.

Transformational grammar means that the two levels must be related.

Chomsky managed to elaborate a grammar that satisfies necessities.

Chomsky proposed a generic-transformational grammar.

Chomsky goes against the behaviourists because he says that the art of language is in creation, not in imitation. Babies hear the whole environment, including mistakes, and this results in input, what goes in, and output, what comes out which is perfect. This is only possible because the baby creates.

According to Schomsky, there should be a generative grammar and a distributionist grammar. He was a disciple of the distributionists, but they rejected the existence of passive transforms.

Deep structure gives us the actives and sometimes the passives. Chomsky, to differentiate this one from the other, said that deep structure was simpler, and that surface structure only gives us passives.